


Every Breath You Take

by hephaestiions



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Angst and Tragedy, Child Death, M/M, Miscommunication, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:35:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 19,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24570895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hephaestiions/pseuds/hephaestiions
Summary: It starts and ends with Death.Scorpius was just caught in between. Like always.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Comments: 45
Kudos: 98
Collections: HP UnHappily Ever After Fest 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story deals with several very sensitive subject matters including the death of a child, death of a partner, major character deaths and ends in tragedy. There is little happiness to be found, so please read at your own discretion and heed the warnings.

The day Scorpius wakes up knowing he’s going to die, there are two people in his bedroom.   
  
The two armchairs on opposite sides of the bed are ever so slightly misplaced– sitting diagonally across from each other, as though the two people who sit in them can’t bear to look the other in the eye. Scorpius has seen the way Aunt Hermione’s eyes linger on the placement when she comes to visit.

Knows that she catches on in a split second.

When their eyes meet, Scorpius shoots her a wan smile he doesn’t expect her to return. Behind the apology in her eyes, there’s a familiar frustration, one Scorpius knows intimately. He feels an uncomfortable solidarity with her anguish over the utter inability to fix the situation like she does everything else– the sheer desperation of watching what had once been beautiful collapse in on itself.

Somedays he thinks hers might run even deeper than his own.   
  
To the outside eye, the placement of the chairs seems merely insensitive. Proof of the fact that the most famous family in Wizarding Britain– or should Scorpius say infamous after everything that has happened in the past few years?– can’t keep itself together even at the child’s deathbed. If the newspapers knew, there would be headlines– Feud vs. Fatherhood.

The sharks of the gossip columns have learnt all too well what sort of eye it takes to find the chinks in ironclad armour. How to taste vulnerability in the air.

If they smell blood, they’ll be merciless.

Before the chairs came, before the bed, before the time Scorpius couldn’t get up without the help of magical levers or canes or stabilising potions, Aunt Hermione had asked him why he wasn’t more bitter. It had been in the hospital, on their third visit to the Healer after his diagnosis, when Harry and Draco weren’t looking at each other in the waiting room. She had given them a look when she had walked in, summoned by Scorpius’ discreet owl– a look so blatantly disgusted that even Draco Malfoy turned away.   
  
“It would be so easy,” she had said, looking at them– heads turned away from each other, sitting two chairs apart across the room. “So easy to hate them. Why don’t you? _How_ don’t you?”

At first he hadn’t been able to answer the question.   
  
“Do you?” He had eventually counter-questioned, placing a hand on her arm.

“It’s difficult,” she’d admitted after a reluctant pause. “So fuc– very difficult not to.”

He had laughed at her censoring herself, poking her in the ribs to remind her he’s fifteen and he hears worse on a daily basis from all his mates in the Ravenclaw Tower after Professor Longbottom sets them homework. He’d dodged the question for then.   
  
After his treatment, he was lying exhausted and depleted on the narrow hospital bed, understanding with slow dawning horror that his Ravenclaw curiosity to understand what its like to live through a war– a real war!– was about to be met in the only way it could be at an unprecedented time of peace in the Wizarding World. That’s when she’s walked in again. Both Harry and Draco were asleep on either side of him, Draco’s monitoring charms still beeping faintly and Harry’s wand clutched in his loose grasp. Even in sleep they looked protective, ready to wake up and fight whatever demons were besieging Scorpius’ rest.   
  
She’d met his eyes then, watched him struggle to breathe with tears in her own and had rushed out of the room crying when he’d said in a hoarse, broken voice that this is why he couldn’t hate them. That they needed him to keep their own pices together just as much as he needed them now.   
  
The press fabricates stories of the infamous family feud and Aunt Hermione is always going to be sceptical and Uncle Blaise will always avoid the armchairs and sit on Scorpius’ bed during his visits.

Scorpius doesn’t mind it. Not as much as they all expect him to.

As for the armchairs– only Scorpius and his fathers know with certainty the strategy behind the way they have been stationed in the room– one close enough for his hair to be caressed, the other for his hand to be held.   
  
It’s always been that way, since childhood, when all three of them would sleep in the same king sized bed in the upstairs master bedroom, cuddled up together. Scorpius would have his head buried in Harry’s chest as Harry stroked his hair, singing him lullabies when he would be on sugar highs, unable to sleep. Draco’s arm would be curled around his middle, tapping a soothing rhythm against Scorpius’ knuckles, drawing gentle patterns against his palm.   
  
It’s one of the happiest memories Scorpius has. One of the reasons (besides avoiding the uncomfortable head-turning that would have come with any other position) that Scorpius had asked Harry to put the chairs this way in this room. Something had briefly flickered in those green eyes then, and Harry had spent a little too long perfecting the position of what was to be Draco’s chair.   
  
Draco and Harry don’t take turns to sit with Scorpius. He knows that’s what Aunt Hermione and Uncle Ron do when Hugo’s autoimmune disease plays up. Aunt Hermione takes a couple of days off, then Uncle Ron. They’re divorced, not dysfunctional.

(That’s something Aunt Hermione has brought up more than once with both Harry and Draco, looking down pointedly at their still gleaming wedding rings.)

But for Harry and Draco, that sort of schedule doesn’t work. There’s no routine. That would require the couple (the couple!) to be in sync. The last time Scorpius can remember them having been in sync was three years ago, when they had their last fight in the kitchen, throwing well timed barbs at each other, baring their teeth and saying exactly the things they knew to be shards of a poisoned dagger slicing through each other’s hearts.   
  
No, his fathers don’t take turns, they simply show up when they can and… adjust.   
  
Whenever Draco’s in the room, he sits holding Scorpius’ hand in a deceptively light grip, staring at the other armchair if it is empty, and at the bedspread if it isn’t. He doesn’t talk much, answering Scorpius’ questions about his day quietly, asking none of his own. If the world outside knew, they would be all too willing to judge Draco even for this– his apparent indifference in the face of Scorpius’… situation.

They don’t feel the way Draco always holds on to the pulse point at Scorpius’ wrist, the subtle reminder of life. They don’t see Draco’s silent tears illuminated by the full moon, sliding down his cheeks– cheeks so much paler than they were even a year ago– when he thinks Scorpius is asleep.   
  
Harry, on the other hand, prefers to run his calloused fingers through Scorpius’ hair, massaging his scalp, telling stories if he’s alone and sitting with the posture of the Head Auror in a meeting with the Minister if he’s not.

He talks a lot when it’s just him and Scorpius. Fills the quiet room with his rich baritone, stories of places Scorpius will never see and people he will never meet. Scorpius thinks he should be a little more resentful of Death, but Harry Potter could have been a writer if he wasn’t an Auror, given his uncanny knack for making even the mundane act of walking down a street seem like something out of a fantasy novel. He finds himself unable to resent that which allows him to spend this much time with his father, taking trips down lanes as vivid with brimming life as Scorpius had been even a few vital years ago.   
  
But when they are all in the room together, everything comes to a standstill. There is no movement. Scorpius finds himself startled by the sound of birds alighting on the windowsill, so accustomed he is in those moments to the statue like stillness. Breaths are cautious, measured. One too loud might bring on eye-contact better left avoided. One too soft might bring on panic better left bottled.  
  
Scorpius has taught himself to live with it.

In fact, in those odd, numb moments, he finds himself able to actually reflect on the conventional things people expect him to reflect on: what comes after? Where do I go? What happens to the people I leave behind?   
  
At the grand old age of sixteen, when Draco is a comforting presence near his hip in the mornings and Harry reminds him of days gone by long ago when they would sit in bed together and read from picture books at night, these questions are a waste of precious time. He relegates only the time he is already wasting to them, especially since he’s unlikely to come up with any answers. It puts him in an adequately pensive mood, and though they stopped wearing matching outfits around the time Scorpius was six years old, ten years later it’s transformed to a matching state of mind in the moments spent together.   
  
Today he sees Draco first, his head lolling back in the chair. It’s a perpetual problem every time he falls asleep by Scorpius’ bed– his frame too tall for the chair to accommodate him entirely. Draco’s taken to wincing in pain these days when he turns his head too sharply and more than once Scorpius has noticed him rolling his shoulders, trying to work out the kinks and cricks.   
  
There used to be a time when he wouldn’t have thought twice before looking up at Harry beseechingly, pulling on his fingers to convince him to give him a back rub. Harry would feign annoyance, and Scorpius would giggle at Draco’s pout. Then Harry would give in, smiling soppily, and Draco would sigh in relief and Scorpius would watch in astonishment at how bloody happy his fathers seemed to become just by being near each other.  
  
That’s a pipe dream now.

Sometimes he wonders if Harry had sized the chairs wrong intentionally, just to make Draco uncomfortable, and then quickly disabuses himself of the notion. Harry would only think to be petty if he cared a whit. There was a time even after everything went to shit when Harry did– when Draco could still get to him, when the press and the shit they printed made him angry and flushed. Now, that’s gone, and he only looks at Draco with an odd sort of blank acceptance and only very occasionally discomfort.   
  
Chances are, he simply commissioned the standard armchair size and adjusted himself to whatever was available. Scorpius won’t be surprised if Harry’s armchair has its own glaring faults– too narrow for his shoulders, too soft for a body accustomed to the hard backed Ministry chairs. Harry won’t complain out of indifference and Draco won’t complain out of pride.

Scorpius doesn’t bother because it’s too tiring.

If his magic worked anymore, he would have looked up the Transfiguration charms himself, but it doesn’t, so that’s pointless. He’s been meaning to ask Aunt Hermione discreetly when she comes to visit next– he’s forgotten the last few times.   
  
Harry cares about Scorpius– it’s obvious. The bed he rests on lacks for nothing. The pillow is not too fluffy, the bedsheets smooth and interwoven with automatic freshening charms that activate every night. There are levers that allow Scorpius to move the upper half of the bed too sit up when he feels too weak to move himself. Though he doesn’t know for sure, Scorpius is willing to bet it is made of the most expensive materials and probably commissioned from some ostentatious establishment that caters specifically to terminally ill patients from filthy rich families.

Most importantly, the diligent Auror who never asked for personal leave except when Kingsley thrust it on him has been staying home three days a week (four, if one includes Sundays), asking his PA to take over paperwork and his best friend (and Deputy) to take over the more challenging field work.   
  
“We need you, Harry” Scorpius had once heard Uncle Ron whisper in the hallway outside his room. “It’s the nastiest piece of work we’ve seen in a decade and a half, mate, more people have died in two weeks than the last three months. Please, just today.”

“I’ll be back on the force soon enough,” Harry had said. “Until then, Ron, _handle it._ ”   
  
The reference to what was coming hadn’t hurt Scorpius, merely surprised him. Relieved him even, that his father had accepted he was going to die without the fanfare that usually accompanied these things.   
  
But then Harry had stepped into the room with a smile, a book and a look in his eyes so lost that Scorpius had known that he might be stoic in the face of this– he might have been trained to be stoic under pressure– but he wasn’t, by any means, okay.

It had led to one of those rare moments he had opened his arms up for a hug, and Harry had stepped into it with a surprised huff, and held on longer than he usually did.

Part of the reason Scorpius doesn’t allow himself to dwell on those ‘conventional questions’ (what will happen to my father… after?) is that he knows his mind will wander to Harry, and eventually his tear ducts will catch up. If he starts crying when both his parents are in the room, it will create a situation so painfully awkward that Scorpius will probably begin to wish for Death quicker than it’s coming.   
  
Instead, he focuses on the sound of Harry’s breathing and the rise and fall of Draco’s chest and tells himself that when the time comes, someone will step up to take care of these two foolish men in his absence.   
  
He hopes it’s Aunt Hermione.   
  
These are the things people think when they’re dying, Scorpius wonders into the dusky darkness of the room.   
  
“You barely ever think about yourself, boy,” an old man had told him, during his lengthy hospitalisation when all the private rooms were occupied and he had to be stuck with the ‘riff-raff’ (Draco had said that, turning up his nose during the visiting hours, though keeping his voice blessedly low) for a few days. “You never understand how much of your life isn’t about your life at all until it’s about to end.”

It was a difficult statement to understand at fifteen, when Death was more a point of debate and discussion with Rose than an impending reality.   
  
Now, Scorpius supposes it’s true.   
  
Draco rolls his shoulders in his sleep. Scorpius’ hand itches for his wand. He longs to conjure a blanket to drape it over Draco, or perfect the chair so he’s more comfortable. Expressions of love aren’t frequently uttered between Scorpius and Draco, but every morning Scorpius wakes up to drapes charmed to filter in the exact amount of light he finds comfortable, and a modified Muffliato to keep all the sounds of the spells hissing around him soft and soothing. This magic, intricate and precise is as complex and intuitive as the fine arts, and definitely not Harry’s forte.   
  
This is how Malfoy blood speaks its love.   
  
No handsy caresses, no generous amounts of affectionate words– just calm, gentle reassurance that exists in the simplest things. A shared wand. Subtle charms. The brush of a finger against a fading pulse, trying to take and give strength simultaneously.   
  
“That is your father, is it not?” A voice murmurs from the chair he had assumed Harry was sitting in.   
  
He would have known for sure if he had the energy to turn his head to his right and strain his eyes against the darkness of the room, but his body feels boneless. His muscles are aching, a low, dull throb that Scorpius has grown somewhat accustomed to. But in this moment, he is conscious of all his weaknesses, of every line of frailty in his form. Finding out who is sitting in his room doesn’t seem worth the effort it will take to move.   
  
He has a feeling this isn’t someone he’s seen before. The voice speaking the words is gravelly, unfamiliar and thickly accented– a lilt from somewhere Scorpius can’t name. But with every word, Scorpius relaxes further into his pillows, any traces of uncertainty melting away into the unseen parts of his surroundings. Something about the stranger, despite the unfamiliarity, feels comfortable.   
  
“It is,” he says, instead of shrieking for Father to wake up. There’s no need after all. There’s no threat– he can feel it in the roots of his latent magic. “It’s Draco Malfoy. Everyone knows.”

“Pardon me, I find names cumbersome,” the stranger says. “I deal in faces.”

“Should I wake him up?” Scorpius asks, unsure what to make of that last statement. “I’d really rather not, I don’t think he’s getting much sleep these days.”

“If it was him I wished to speak to, child, I would,” the stranger says, amusement tinging the heavy accent lighter.   
“Then you’re here for me?” Scorpius asks. It seems right somehow. Fitting. He doesn’t know why the stranger’s presence slots into that possibility so well, but it seems to align with cosmic certainty.

The stranger says nothing.   
  
“Where’s Dad?” Scorpius asks, when no answer seems to be forthcoming. He’s confused, but the part of him that is supposed to feel confusion is distant, like a voice trying to reach him underwater. “It’s his day off. He’s supposed to be where you are.”   
  
“Outside, I believe, if you are speaking of who I think you are.”

“My other father,” Scorpius says, feeling gently perplexed. Merlin, they must be from somewhere else. “Harry Potter. For Merlin’s sake, don’t you know _anyone_?”

“I know him by another name,” says the stranger. This time the words are serious, unamused. Scorpius even suspects them to be slightly reverential.

“What would that be?” Scorpius asks, feeling the familiar tug of sleep behind his eyelids. These days he can’t stay awake for very long. It’s exhausting, and even seeing is a strenuous act.

All that light. All that life.

It feels a little surreal, too much for Scorpius’ brain that has accepted Death to be reality and cannot comprehend life fully anymore. “The Saviour? The Boy-Who-Lived? The Mismatched One?” He pauses, and adds, “I’m not sure where the Prophet was going with that last one, so I’m hoping that’s not the one you’re going for.”   
  
The stranger remains silent. It’s easy to forget they’re even there.   
  
But in the few seconds of wakefulness before one slips into sleep, the moments in retrospect that seem indiscernible from dreams, Scorpius hears the stranger speak, the accent of the words sharpening.   
  
“Master,” they say, and it takes Scorpius a moment to realise what they might be insinuating. “My Master.”

It is the last thing Scorpius hears before he gives into the tug of dreamless sleep beckoning him closer to an eternity of it.   
  
–  
  
When he wakes up again, Draco is sitting where he should be, both his hands holding Scorpius’. There are hands in his hair too, blunt fingers scratching soothing patterns across his scalp. This time, the other visitor in the room is most definitely Harry.  
  
“Morning,” he mumbles thickly through the taste of dust and cobwebs in his mouth. It’s a symptom of the Wasting Curse, the Healers had told him. It won’t allow him to taste food properly.   
  
“The taste,” Healer Brocklehurst had said hesitantly, when Scorpius had complained, “has been described by many in the same position as the taste of Death.” Harry had grown pale hearing the words, his tongue darting out to smooth over his chapped bottom lip. Scorpius remembers Draco’s fingers twitching against his arm. As a fifteen year old who had once been an open mouthed child exploring the hallways of a dusty Manor house filled to the brim with insect life not merely limited to small spiders, Scorpius chooses to characterise the unpleasant taste in a less melodramatic fashion.   
  
Scorpius had hoped for a last pastry before death– a relished, rich one purchased for him by his fathers from some patisserie in France. He’s never really been spoiled, but there are advantages to both your fathers having excessive gold in their vaults saved up for your future.

But one cannot have everything one wants.   
  
He hears Harry snort. “It’s five in the evening, love. You’ve slept through the day.”

It is unusual, Scorpius knows. His sleep is fitful. Not violent spasms, not writhing screams, no nightmares– just sharp bursts of pain blooming through his body, intensifying like cramps. He usually wakes to them slowly, through eyelashes stuck together with silent tears and sleep, and when his breathing grows too laboured for him to secret away his discomfort, Harry or Draco will wake, softly ask him where it hurts and apply muscle relaxant charms or pressure or massages.

Sometimes they happen in places like his tongue, or his heart, or his nail beds– nothing helps then, but they try anyway.   
  
For the past two years they’ve been trying.  
  
This is not the time to dwell on such things, Scorpius tells himself, miffed by his inability to keep the thoughts he has dealt with so well thus far at bay. There is something he needs to tell them that takes precedence over melancholic reflection.   
  
“Hey,” he says, trying to sit up. It’s alarming to find that impossible. It’s not that he can’t feel his body (the Healers had said that it might manifest as a symptom as the Curse progressed), but he can feel quite acutely just how weak it is. He knows how much strength it will require to push himself up. he knows he doesn’t have it. “I have something to say to you.”

“We’re listening,” Harry says, putting a broad hand on his shoulder, gently pushing him down onto the bed. His tense back muscles relax as best as they can, and Scorpius tries to take comfort in the warmth of Harry’s hand spreading across his chest through his bedclothes. “It’s okay, yeah?”

Scorpius smiles.   
  
“Father,” he says, tilting up the edge of it in a question. “Come closer?”

He feels, rather than hears Draco rise from the chair. His hand is let go of, and Draco comes to stand beside him. He’s too tall– he always has been– towering over Scorpius’ low bed like a giant. But when Scorpius hooks a finger closer, the edges of his lips briefly lift before he drops to his knees.   
  
“Hello,” he says, voice rough. Draco’s more vulnerable than people think he is. The eyes looking into his, grey like his own, and speckled with blue, are oceans of bottled pain. “How are you feeling?”

“Like shit,” Scorpius says, wheezing a laugh that transforms into a cough quickly. “What did you think?”

At this, Draco cracks a smile. He raises a hand and pushes it into Scorpius’ hair. It’s one of the things the Curse hasn’t taken– his hair. Like father, like son, he thinks wryly, immensely thankful for this one small exemption the Curse seems to have made. He doesn’t mind dying as much as he probably should, but he minds dying ugly far more than one in his position ought to. The Curse has wrecked a body that used to be muscled from Quidditch, but at least his face still remains acceptable, framed by the characteristic Malfoy blonde hair. Draco pretends to despair over the curly, untameable quality it seems to possess, but it’s often put upon– a little exaggerated. Scorpius knows that his hair, or the ruffled, messy nest it often transforms into, is a part of Harry that Draco can caress without having to examine feelings, animosity and a failed marriage up close.

  
He turns his head, and Harry is still sitting on the armchair, watching the two of them with unreadable eyes. “Come here,” Scorpius admonishes. “You’re too far away.”

Harry slides out of the chair and kneels, moving closer to the bed. He rests his chin on the edge of it, looking up at Scorpius. Scorpius’ weak heart spasms at the empty smile Harry shoots him. It’s laced with an unfathomable sadness that he knows Harry is trying to hide, and probably isn’t even conscious of revealing. His eyes are dry, but there’s a strange look in them– a fierce, protectiveness juxtaposed against the helplessness of the situation.   
  
Harry wears his heart on his face, and every line of it speaks of love– more love than Scorpius can imagine what to do with. It’s enough of a caress, all that love washing over him, and for the first time, a lump rises in Scorpius’ throat.

For the first time, the inevitability of what he is about to say seems overwhelming.   
  
“I love you both, you know that, right?” he says, closing his eyes against the sappiness of the words and the onslaught of tears. “I love you so much, and I wish I could have been here longer. With both of you.”

“Shh,” Draco says, and when Scorpius looks at him, he’s crying. He’s not even trying to hide it, simply letting the tears run tracks down his cheeks and drip onto the blue bedsheets. “Quiet, my boy, that’s not…” He trails off, unsure how to complete his sentence.   
  
Harry doesn’t say anything, but his eyes are squeezed shut, and his lower lip is sucked into his mouth.   
  
“But I think,” Scorpius says, trying to be gentle, trying to be kind, “I think it’s time to say goodbye.”

They both seem to have expected this, because neither of them look shocked or even surprised. When Harry opens his eyes, his glasses are fogged over, and Draco’s tears flow freer than before. Their fingers tighten on his arms.   
  
Scorpius heaves a sigh. He had known it would be difficult, but this is simultaneously harder and easier than he had expected. On one hand, he doesn’t have to placate distraught, disbelieving parents who seem to be in denial. On the other, every bit of Scorpius’ soul aches with the vulnerability in Draco’s mouth and Harry’s clenched jaw.   
  
It’s a long time before anyone speaks. It’s Harry who breaks the silence eventually. “Do you want me– want us to call anyone, love? To talk? We can let them know… before.”

Scorpius tries not to cry. It is his death (his death!) that finally gets his dad to consider himself and Father a unit. It’s bittersweet.   
  
“Rose and Hugo would be nice,” he says instead, clearing his throat. “Merlin knows Rose will bring me back and kill me again if I don’t say goodbye. Victoire and Teddy too. Aunt Hermione, if she’s not too busy. Ginny, please. She made me promise… Oh and,” he closes his eyes and smiles, “Professor McGonagall. If she agrees.”

“We’ll make arrangements,” Draco says, nodding affirmatively. He looks rather like the barrister who ensures the best for his high profile clients. “No one’s too busy, darling. They’ll all come, I promise you.”

Scorpius nods. His neck hurts.  
  
They both rise to leave, but panic grips Scorpius. If they leave together, they’ll invariably argue about how to go about this. It won’t be a fight– his parents are past that– but it will be time-consuming, vicious and Scorpius, despite his best efforts to put himself last, finds it unbearable to allow his fathers to argue in these moments. He can feel his last few minutes trickling away like sand.

It’s selfish, it might even be a little cruel–but if he’s going to what Muggles call Hell, it won’t be for this.

“Can one of you stay with me?” he pleads. He’s almost ashamed of how broken his voice comes out. 

For the first time in many years, Draco and Harry’s eyes meet over their son’s deathbed. They have one of those silent conversations they used to be catcalled for at parties when they couldn’t take their eyes off each other. For one split, surreal second, there’s no court case, no slander, no Prophet publications.

Just parents, loving and grieving and trying their best to hold on and let go of their son.

Eventually, they both nod in acquiescence. Harry gives Scorpius a watery smile, presses a kiss to his forehead and leaves, shutting the door softly behind him. Draco waits for his steps to fade down the hallway before sinking back down and letting his head drop onto the bed. His shoulders shake, his hands clench in the bedsheets. Scorpius lets him cry uninterrupted.   
  
A tear stain spreads across the pristine bedsheets.


	2. Chapter 2

Scorpius opens his eyes to bright light and a sense of unfamiliar emptiness, instinctively aware that he isn’t alive.  
  
It’s a strange realisation to come to– the knowledge that one is dead. It’s less something he feels and more something he… doesn’t. Since the last time his eyes had been open, something within him has simply stopped.  
  
Sometimes, when dying, watching birds alight on his windowsill and feelings his fathers hands in his hair, he used to feel like a Muggle clock whose minute hand had stopped working. Going by that metaphor, he can say with unfortunate certainty that the hour hand too has finally given up on telling the time.  
  
His clock has stopped, the slowing hands finally accepting the inevitability of the end. He presses a hand to his chest. There’s no heartbeat.  
  
“The dead do not put stock in the signs of life,” says a voice behind him.  
  
Scorpius turns.  
  
“You,” he says, to the stranger standing behind him. They aren’t a stranger anymore. Even the last time they hadn’t been. Scorpius had just been too confused to understand. “You came to visit me. _Before.”_  
  
A slight inclination of the head.  
  
“I didn’t know that was possible,” Scorpius says. “Death does not just pay a visit to the living, like some sort of brooding houseguest.”

“Arguably, that is precisely the job description,” they say, and Scorpius can’t help the laugh that bubbles up.

“You know what I mean. I shouldn’t have been able to see you and come out of it alive.”

An inclination of a brow. “And here you stand, perfectly aware that you didn’t.” 

Scorpius breathes out. It strikes him that breathing isn’t something he needs to do, or even something that functions for him anymore. It’s just a familiar motion he is repeating in the strangeness that is… whatever the bloody hell this is. Which brings him to–  
  
“Where _am_ I?”

  
“Haven’t you looked around?”

Scorpius startles. He hadn’t even thought to do that since he got his bearings. He was caught up in… other things. Like having a corporeal form despite being dead, whatever that means. Like greeting Death the way his father had once told him to when he’d been drunk and vulnerable by his bedside.  
  
“It’s easy,” Harry had said. “It’s easy when you greet Death like an old friend. There’s no point in resistance. There’s no point in argument. There’s no point fighting when you already know you’ve lost. Best not make enemies with the inevitable.” At the time, Scorpius hadn’t known if Harry was really talking about Death itself or the death of something else entirely, like Harry’s ability to meet Draco’s eyes.  
  
Now, he realises the weight of the words.  
  
He looks around, and for a split second thinks his heart is going to stop before he remembers it already has.

  
“Here?” he asks, panic stricken. “Why _here_? Am I a ghost? I don’t want to be! Especially not here! I’m at peace with death, I _swear–_ ”

Death shakes their head. “Not a ghost. Just waiting.”

“Waiting?” Scorpius asks, sinking down onto the familiar bed. “ _Waiting_? Waiting for what? Don’t tell me this is– this is– _purgatory! Not here!_ ” 

A small laugh. Scorpius finds himself relaxing at the sound. It’s strange, how calming Death is. “Indeed it isn’t. It is exactly what it looks like. You are where you seem to be. It is no illusion, child.”

“You’re telling me,” Scorpius says, slowly, “that my eternal punishment is my _home?_ My _bedroom?_ ”

“Not quite,” Death says. Their face is an indeterminable kaleidoscope. Sometimes he thinks it looks like someone he knows, and sometimes it could be any innocuous stranger on the street. “It isn’t exactly punishme–”

They cut themselves off when the door squeaks open. The handle turns and a pale hand lingers on it for a brief moment before falling away. There’s a slight, almost imperceptible tremble to it. Scorpius eyes trail upwards, to where Draco stands in the doorway. There’s a shadow behind him– Harry’s silhouette visible in the dimness of the hallway. Draco’s eyes are rimmed with red. Harry’s breaths are harsh, yet shallow. Neither of them are saying anything.  
  
It’s the closest Scorpius has seen them willingly be in three years.  
  
He moves towards them, hesitant and unsure. It seems unlikely that they can see him, given their lack of reaction, but he doesn’t know how they would react to his touch. Whether it would be some phantom cold sensation churning their stomachs like the touch of Hogwarts ghosts. Whether his hand would pass right through them. But even as he reaches out, and very gently and delicately strokes his father’s week old beard, Draco doesn’t react.

_He can’t feel it,_ Scorpius realises. He’s alarmed by how disappointing it is. _I’m not here. Not for them._  
  
Draco stands there, unmoving and steady, cool eyes surveying the room. Scorpius tries to perceive it from Draco’s perspective and winces. What had once been a bright and cheery bedroom looks more like a private hospital room that’s recently been cleared out. The bed is pristine with white sheets. The curtains are drawn. There’s nothing personal in any part of it. Someone’s been here and cleaned it up to remove all discernible traces of Scorpius. He suspects it was Rose.

Draco opens his mouth and Scorpius steels himself to watch another argument, but no cutting words slice through the thickness in the air. Instead, Draco says in a voice cold as ice and smooth as stone, “Would you like me to seal this room up?”  
  
“No,” comes the hoarse response from Harry. “ _Absolutely not._ ”

Draco inclines his head. His eyelashes flutter shut, and remain that way for a second longer than they should if he were as unaffected as he is trying to be. “Small mercies,” he says, without even a trace of bitter humour.

Harry doesn’t respond.  
  
“We had a long time to get used to it,” Draco murmurs eventually, and though his voice sounds confident, his eyes are lost at sea. If a sailor losing control of his ship were to catch sight of gathering storm clouds on the horizon, the look Draco has on his fine-boned face would not be out of place. Scorpius realises that whatever has stopped within him might as well have stopped within Draco too. He seems just as empty.  
  
“We did,” Harry says. His voice breaks on the syllables. If Draco’s lost himself at sea, Harry is crashing on the jagged rocks. 

“I’ll be moving out,” Draco says, by way of response. Scorpius can’t help the startled gasp that falls from his lips. He knows he doesn’t need to hold it back, not anymore, but the wince that accompanies the betrayal of his true emotions is automatic. If he had been alive, it would have been unforgivable.  
  
Only by his standards, of course. Harry and Draco would probably be glad for an honest response.  
  
Harry says nothing for a brief moment. When he speaks, he appears more composed that he has in the past few minutes. “When?”  
  
“In about two weeks. Just as long as it takes to get the flat furnished.”  
  
They stand there, watching the empty bed. Scorpius wishes he could scream to some avail. He wishes he could cry into Aunt Hermione’s lap. This hurts more than knowing Death was coming ever did.

Standing here, _watching.  
_  
It’s Harry who moves first. He heaves a sigh that echoes through the empty room, raises a hand as though to touch Draco before he thinks better of it. Abruptly, he turns on his heel and stomps away down the corridor, his boots thudding on the wooden floor.

Briefly he stops, and Draco’s blank, lost expression gains a little alertness. His eyes dart to the side and his fingers clutch at his robes for a split second.  
  
“Draco…” Harry begins, and his voice sounds small, far away. “You’ll let me know if you need any… signatures, yes?”  
  
Something pained and nauseated flickers in Draco’s grey eyes, before they fall right back into a cool mask. His fingers stop twitching.  
  
“Of course,” he says, and backs away from the doorway. Scorpius shuts his eyes, and when he opens them, the door is closing, Draco’s pale hand disappearing into darkness.  
  
He turns to face Death once he’s sure he won’t cry. He doesn’t know if he could either way, but old habits die hard.  
  
“So that’s the eternal punishment,” Scorpius says, flatly. “ _Watching._ Watching my parents fall apart.”

“There is no eternal punishment,” Death says. “This isn’t a punishment at all. This is waiting.”

_“Waiting for what?”  
_

Death meets his eyes with an unnerving gaze. Scorpius can’t pinpoint the exact shade of their eyes. “Sometimes,” they say, and the gravelly voice is far more gentle than Scorpius expects it to be, “sometimes, some of you–” They break off. Look away. “Sometimes there are bonds stronger than that of your mortality and my arrival. Bonds which tie you to something other than me. And when that happens… you must wait.”

“What the bloody hell does that even _mean_?”

“Family. Sometimes, you must wait for family.”

“They’re young!” Scorpius protests. “And they’re wizards! I’ll be here at least a _century_ , waiting for men in their early forties to die. I’ll be bloody lucky if it isn’t two! I can’t–” he says, swallowing, “I can’t just _watch_ them do this to themselves. Please. _Please._ ”  
  
Something turns pitying in Death’s gaze. It’s unbearable. Pity always has been.  
  
“Time is a construct of the living,” they say. “But even by our measures, it will not be long.”

Whatever is in place of Scorpius’ heart drops like a stone at the words. “What do you mean?” He asks, concerned panic leaching into his words. “What on _earth_ do you–”

With a careless wave, Death gestures to the door of the bedroom swinging open. Harry steps in, unaccompanied. For the first time, Scorpius gets a good look at him. Scorpius resists the urge to ask if there is Hell, and if the creatures residing within it look the way Harry does right now. There’s red puffiness around his eyes, and his usually tousled hair is stringy and lank. His lips, dry at the best of times are cracked and bloody. There are bruises on his knuckles and an inexplicable gash on his forehead that hasn’t been cleaned.

He looks like he went flying into a chest of drawers and rooted himself out of the wreckage.

He looks like he would do it again.  
  
He stands in the doorway for a long minute, surveying the room. Without warning or explanation, he violently lurches and stumbles in. The swinging door crashes shut. If Draco’s still in the house, there’s no possible way he didn’t hear that noise.

Scorpius knows with dread certainty that Draco won’t come to check.

Harry stands in the middle of the room, swaying on his feet. He inhales sharply, a ragged gasp of air and falls to the floor in a spectacular heap of black robes and sallow skin.  
  
Scorpius wants to laugh. Hysterically.  
  
A century, he’d said? A fucking _century?_  
  
Harry’d be lucky to last a year. 


	3. Chapter 3

“Draco,” says the woman sitting across from him in the chair, “we can’t do this unless you tell me what you want.”

Draco brings the glass of smoking Firewhisky to his lips, and stares at the carpet. It needs a few cleaning spells, he thinks, staring at the dark hairs caught in the fur.

  
“Draco,” says the woman, deceptively patient. “No matter what you think, I really don’t have all day.”

Draco snorts. The Firewhisky sloshes. “For the amount you’re being paid, you have all day and all night and all of whatever’s in between, whenever I want, don’t you think? That is what you signed yourself up for.”

She doesn’t bat an eyelash at the words, caustic though they are. After all, he surmises, she _is_ being paid rather handsomely to put up with this and anything else he can come up with. It’s an effective way of draining vaults that do not have to pay for a child’s education anymore.

“If this isn’t a good time,” she says, frustratingly calm, “then you can Floo me when you think it is. I will be, as you well know, _available_.”   
  
Draco snorts again. Takes another swig of whisky. He puts it down and opens the top button of his shirt.   
  
The woman raises her eyebrows pointedly. Draco smirks. “It is rather hot,” he says, gesturing to the fire.   
  
She coughs delicately. “Indeed it is.”

Perhaps it is a trick of the light and the dancing flames, but her pupils seem to dilate slightly. Draco’s smirk broadens.   
  
“You know,” he says conversationally, voluntarily speaking for the first time this evening, “my son was the one to first suggest I do this.” He gestures between them, and the woman’s eyebrows shoot so far into her hairline, they run the risk of disappearing.   
  
“Seems a little… inappropriate, doesn’t it? For a son so young to be bold enough to suggest such a relationship?” she asks.

If only she’d known Scorpius.   
  
Draco looks into the fire. For a split second he remembers the boy he was at sixteen– scared, lost, _broken_. At forty two, as a man, he’s sharper, greyer and taller, but at the end of the day, it all boils down to being a Malfoy left with no choice.

It’s only a moment’s weakness, though.  
  
“Trust me,” he says, lowering his voice slightly, “of all the… _relationships_ my son suggested, this was possibly the least inappropriate.”   
  
She doesn’t take him up on the innuendo or the callous way in which he speaks of his dead child. If she wasn’t bound by an inked Unbreakable Vow, the press would be orgasming from the pleasure of this scoop.   
  
“A good bond then?” she asks instead. Her dark eyes are oddly perceptive while being almost guileless. It’s a little unnerving, looking into them. “Between you and your son? Open? _Honest?_ ”

Draco can’t help the involuntary smile creeping onto his face. He isn’t sure he wants to. Dead or not, Scorpius is his pride and joy. Dead or not, he’s still a father. There are some things that _won’t_ change, and this is one of them.  
  
“Like you wouldn’t believe,” he murmurs, and raises the whisky glass. It’s an unmistakeable toast, and even in the closed stuffiness of the room, a curtain flutters, as though in answer.   
  
“Would you like to talk about it?” Her eyes briefly flicker to the whisky glass, and the calm mask turns disdainful for a moment before settling. “About your son?”

He turns his eyes from a close survey of the orange flames to the woman’s face. She’s pretty, but not exactly his type. He likes darker hair, lighter eyes. Sharper jawlines.   
  
“Do you know why the Blacks named their children after constellations? Galaxies? _Stars_ , if you will?”   
  
She shakes her head. “It’s a known fact, of course, but the reasoning is understood to be tradition.”

Draco waves a dismissive hand. “Yes, yes, of course it’s tradition. It’s _always_ tradition once it crosses the second generation mark. But there isn’t a tradition in the world that exists… arbitrarily. They have to start somewhere.”

“Of course,” the woman murmurs. Her gaze turns assessing, honing into the slightly unfocused nature of Draco’s rambling. He doesn’t seem to notice. “Where did this one start, then?”

“There was a woman, Anuradha Choudhury, about six generations ago, who married into the Black family. Very upper class betrothal, despite it being overseas. Prestigious Wizarding family. Indian origins.”

He closes his eyes and his fingers trace patterns on the moisture on the glass.   
  
“In their culture, there’s a tale, that when someone dies, they turn into a star, immortalised forever in the sky. Some seen, some unseen, but all there. And in the infinity of space, there is always room for more.”

The woman nods. “That is a common tale in quite a few cultures, yes.”

“Well,” Draco says, shrugging, “she’s the one who brought it to us. She had two children– twins. They were both born with illnesses likely to kill them young– a blood curse on the boy and a magical tumour for the girl growing in her stomach. He wanted to name them something common and traditional, something made to look fancy on a headstone, but she insisted on naming them after stars.”   
  
“Not Thomas and Elizabeth?” she teases.   
  
Draco doesn’t smile. “Saptarshi and Arundhati. Indian names. The Blacks weren’t the biggest fans, but they accepted it, grieving mother and all.”

“But it stuck?”

This time he smiles. “That’s just it. By some miracle of magic, both of them survived. The girl’s accidental magic manifested extraordinarily young, at just eighteen months, and it destroyed the tumour. One moment she was swaddled in blankets, burning up a fever, on the verge of death and the next she was just another regular squalling baby.”

“The boy?”

“The blood curse remained, he was always weak. Died pretty early too. But the Healers at the time thought early would be a couple years at most. He lived to be thirty six. Had about five ankle biters before he passed on too. No curses on any of them. All of them grew up to be perfectly dishonourable Wizengamot members who helped pass the House Elves Breeding Bill of 1852.”   
  
She huffs a startled laugh. “Why did you tell me this?”   
  
“The involvement of the Black family in House Elf servitude laws is well known, Ms. Richards.”   
  
“You know what I mean,” she admonishes gently. “This is progress. But is there a connection?”

“I’m not a Black,” Draco says, circling the rim of his glass with the tip of his finger. “But my mother kept with the Black tradition of naming me after the skies. Ironically enough, she was one of the few Black children for whom the tradition wasn’t maintained. Quite bit younger than both Bellatrix and Andromeda, you see, and both of them were holy terrors by the time they were twelve and ten, so my grandparents thought it best to go with something safer. It’s the Pureblood way– attributing your children’s faults to everything except yourself. They thought it was a problem with the stars.

“But she named me Draco because she wanted her child to be as tied to the Blacks as the Malfoys. And no Malfoy would object to a name as odd and pretentious as Draco. For a man named Abraxas, a grandson named Draco was the pride and joy of the family.   
  
“I didn’t go by tradition when naming my son. When we knew we would be having him, I went back to the Black library, where the journals were kept. Rooted around for weeks. Tried to find the perfect ancestor to name him after– someone honourable. Someone good. Harry wanted Sirius, but I wouldn’t have it. And then I read this story, and instead of trying to find someone with a history to saddle my son with, I chose a name that would be his and his family’s simultaneously. He was to be born a Scorpio, and it seemed to fit.”   
  
She smiles. “That’s a beautiful story, Draco.”

“Except,” Draco says, with a derisive huff of humourless laughter, “all that pretentiousness didn’t keep him safe, and he’s still dead. At _sixteen._ ”

The room descends into silence. Even the fire is burning low, crackling only mildly.   
  
“Don’t get me wrong, being dead at sixteen is a better fate than being a Death Eater at sixteen trying not to fail. Being dead at sixteen is all I hoped for when _I_ was sixteen. But Scorpius was my son, the boy I wanted to protect from the person I had become when I was sixteen. He was a Ravenclaw, and multiple times Flitwick told me he would be some sort of miracle inventor because he devised a charm at twelve that poured his Potions ingredients into the cauldron for him.  
  
“I’m here,” Draco says, looking her in the eye with uncomfortable frankness, “because Hermione categorically asked me to be. I have sent away fifteen other women who sat in that chair and looked at me and asked me questions. Everyone tells me _this is what Scorpius would have wanted_. This is supposed to make me _happy.”_ He looks up, and he glares with a darkness so deep that the woman flinches slightly. “But my son is dead. And he will continue to remain so.”

“Fifteen other women,” she murmurs. “Why am I still here, then?” 

Draco takes two deep gulps of whisky and tries to take a third, only to discover he’s drained the glass. He sets it down on the table and steeples his fingers. She meets his eyes.   
  
“You’re the first one who didn’t look at me with pity.”

“I don’t think that would get us anywhere.”

“Say that to the woman who asked me why there were no pictures of the three of us here.” He moves to rise, before thinking better of it, and gestures to the glass. “A drink? Pardon me, I forgot to ask before.”   
  
“Absolutely not,” she says sharply. “These are working hours. I would advise you to refrain, but it doesn’t seem likely for you to follow my advice.”   
  
“Your advice is to help me process grief, not keep me from alcohol,” he says, tone mild. His fingers clench in the fabric of his pants. Her eyes drop to the gesture and dart away.

There’s an uncomfortable lull. She cracks her knuckles and he taps a Celestina Warbeck tune on the wood of the chair.   
  
“You realise there is a lot of work to be done?” she asks him eventually, breaking them both out of the hush. “No matter how much you pay me, or how many contracts you have me sign informing me I must be available at any time I am not seeing another patient, this will not be a functional relationship unless you do at least some introspection. Unless you’re _willing_.”

“As you’re likely aware, most of the relationships in my life are dysfunctional.”   
  
“It is not my job to keep up with the tabloids, Draco,” she says. A.twist of the fingers. “It is my job to help you _deal_ with what they’re saying.”   
  
“I assure you what they’re saying in the papers about me, my son, or my family is of no interest to me. It hasn’t been for years, Ms. Richards.”

Her brows furrow. “You seem fairly insistent on addressing me as Ms. Richards. I continue to call you Draco– is it something that makes you uncomfortable? I could address you as Mr. Malfoy, if that would help this any. Would a more formal system help you feel more at ease?”

Draco’s jaw hardens. Steel slips into his eyes– it’s practically indiscernible unless one knows what to look for. He stands, sweeping the empty whisky glass up from the table with his left hand, extending his right.   
  
“I believe we’re done for the day, Ms. Richards,” he says, firmness lacing his tone. “If you don’t want that drink.”

She doesn’t seem surprised as she reaches up to grasp his hand.   
  
“I’m certain you know the way to the Floo?” he asks, gesturing to the fireplace beside them. “I trust you can see yourself out?”

She inclines her head slightly. “The schedule stands, then? Same time, next week. Unless of course you’re possessed to give me a call at another time.”

He nods. She moves to leave, standing by the fireplace, a pinch of powder in her hand. He looks down at the carpet and adds, almost as an afterthought, “Ms. Richards?”

She turns. Waits. She’s probably a Slytherin. Maybe a Ravenclaw. Too composed to be anything else. If she cuts her hair right, she could be mistaken for Pansy Parkinson in the streets. He’ll never admit it, but that’s one of the reasons he hadn’t shown her out sooner.

  
“Draco’s fine,” he says, meeting her eyes with a curt nod. “But if you don’t feel comfortable calling me that if I call you Ms. Richards, Mr. Potter-Malfoy would be acceptable.”

She cocks her head to the side. Pointedly she brings her gaze down to rest on his ring– the seven emeralds gleaming bright. “Interesting,” she murmurs. “I’ll keep that in mind.”   
  
With a little curtsy, she ducks into the Floo and in a swirl of green flames, she’s gone.  
  
As Draco falls back into the chair, a whisky bottle whizzes past Scorpius’ head into his outstretched hand.   
  
“So I’ll just stay here till one or both of them decide to die?” He asks, watching as Draco pours a glass out, dangerously overfilling it. 

There’s no response from the figure in the other corner of the room.   
  
“Are you not allowed to answer, or do you just… not?” Scorpius asks again. He isn’t angry, or even upset. Death seems to have cast a film over his emotions. They’re all still there, just muted.  
  
“I do not know how to, without giving away more than I ought,” comes the belated response. 

“Are you even in charge?” Scorpius asks, annoyed. He’s met with an infuriating smile that seems to permeate the dark effortlessly.   
  
“Dad’s looking likelier by the minute,” Scorpius says, looking down at his hands. “Father looks like he could do with twelve more bottles of that stuff, some vodka and a few tough cases against the American legal system. I don’t see _him_ dying anytime soon.” 

“You humans,” Death says, shaking their head. “I never understand. Just when I think I’ve understood one of you, another comes along.”

“Nor do we, mate,” Scorpius says, gloomily. “For instance, Father knows she wants to shag him, and that she’s probably a shit therapist, and he also knows he won’t ever sleep with her, but he’s flirting anyway.”

A raised eyebrow.   
  
“Oh seriously!” Scorpius says, throwing his hands up. “He opens his buttons! He keeps offering her a damn drink like she’s some bird in a bar! He wears his wedding ring, like a temptation of some illicit affair. He’s being all Slytherin about it, but he’s my goddamn father, and I know _exactly_ what he’s doing. All those damn smirks and the revelations and the rubbish stories that he apparently didn’t give a damn about up until tonight.”

“Maybe I do understand his circumstances better,” Death says. Scorpius might be imagining it, but the ever-changing eyes seem to have gone a bit wide. “Or rather, what he meant by an open, honest relationship with his son who suggested inappropriate relations.”

“When you have fathers like Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy, you learn to not give a shit about shame,” Scorpius says with a shrug. There’s no point pretending otherwise. “Maybe if either of them _listened._ ”

“You humans,” Death mutters again. Scorpius wants to lob something at that annoying head, but he won’t be able to lift anything. It’s a pointless, frustrating desire. Instead he simply sits there, watching his father drink away half a bottle of Ogden’s Old in about five minutes.   
  
It’s bloody _boring._  
  
“What I don’t understand,” Scorpius says, after a while of watching Draco swallow orange liquid, without looking like he has any bit of life left in him, “is why _you’re_ still here.”

Death says nothing. It’s a familiar response. When Scorpius looks at them, they appear contemplative.   
  
“What?” Scorpius asks, unnerved when the unblinking stare has been directed at him for far too long. Sometimes they seem more snake than person. They’re neither, but it’s eerie either way to never know what precisely it is you’re looking at. Scorpius had always thought a face was a face, even under glamour charms or Polyjuice. It was still something underneath it all. This seems to genuinely be an unsettling mirage without any underlying reality. “Did I say something wrong?”

“Not quite,” comes the response. “Just something that confuses me too.”

“ _You’re_ confused about why you’re here?” Scorpius asks, bewildered. “Alright, now I _know_. You’re _definitely_ not the one in charge. Where’s Merlin?” 

“Merlin?”

“Yes! Merlin! Bloody Merlin! He’s the one who’s supposed to always know what the bloody fuck is going on, innit? Merlin or Ravenclaw, or anyone really! God? Jesus Christ? Hera? Anyone who knows what’s going on! Dumbledore, maybe? Dad always goes on about that bloke.”

“I could assume his form, if that would comfort you.”

“What do you even care about my comfort?” Scorpius asks, banging his hand against the cabinet door he’s leaning into. When it doesn’t make a sound, he stifles the urge to scream till he’s hoarse. He’ll never be hoarse, and screaming into a void for all eternity does indeed sound more like the hell he’d thought he might go into on an off-chance. Now that he hasn’t (or at least is being told he hasn’t), self inflicted misery sounds a little… pointless. “I’d be comfortable not watching my father drink himself into alcoholism and a pot belly or watch my other father punch the walls into submission, but here I am, and here you are.”

“You’re rather outspoken.”

“That’s the _least_ of my concerns. At least Father has Firewhisky, why don’t I have Firewhisky?”  
  
“Are you not… underage?”   
  
“Weren’t you the one going on about time being a mortal construct?”   
  
“Touché.”  
  
They sit in silence for a few minutes, and Scorpius wonders if he should try to cry and get this pressure off his chest. He doesn’t exactly know how crying would help him to come to terms with his fathers having to die for him to gain eternal peace, but at this point, he’s willing to try anything.

“Would you like me to explain why I think I am here?” Death asks, breaking him out of his pensive thoughts and Scorpius looks up startled.   
  
“You’d do that?”

Death shrugs. The gesture is so decidedly human that Scorpius wants to laugh. Instead he nods. “Please.”

“Do you remember what I told you when I came to visit?”   
  
“I remember you sitting around in Harry’s chair and scaring the living shit out of me.” He looks away and bites down a bitter smile. “Or whatever was left of it anyway.” 

They laugh. There’s no malice in it. “Do you recall what I said about names?”

“You don’t do well with names, you deal in faces,” Scorpius says automatically, mind wandering back to that evening, and the strange conversation. “And that you know Harry Potter by another name.”

“Indeed,” Death says. “Do you recall what it is?”

“You said… Master?” Scorpius questions, swallowing around the syllables of the last word. He’s never been particularly comfortable with that title. Ever since Skeeter did her investigative piece on Harry Potter being the Master of Death, it’s been a regular headline for his dad in the papers. _Master of Death: When Will Potter Put His Powers to Proper Use?_ That accompanied by a magi-shopped picture of Harry looking ready to murder someone and Draco with his wand raised in court with a lightning bolt running down the middle makes their animosity out to be the start of some blood feud thriller. But here it seems actually relevant, not just a title to make the headlines. “There’s all that stuff about the Hallows and they call him the Master of Death… but no one actually knows what that _means_. It sounds like a plan to cheat Death– you, whatever– endlessly, but there’s just– it’s a fucking hard concept to wrap your head around.”

There’s quiet in the room. Draco drinks some more.   
  
“When you think of me, what name do you give me?” Death asks, quiet and gentle.   
  
“Death,” says Scorpius immediately, cursing when his voice breaks over the word. “It’s stupid, I _know_ , it sounds so bloody melodramatic, but–”

“That’s what they all call me,” they say, cutting him off. “But most don’t sit across from me and have conversations about it. There’s no melodrama involved, as you called it. Just perception.”

Scorpius shrugs, and chokes out a laugh. “Son of the most famous couple in Wizarding Britain, probably one of the richest blokes– I was supposed to inherit the Potter, Malfoy _and_ Black vaults if I lived– can you bloody believe you made me give _that_ up?!– and in possession of every single chocolate card figure. I’ve always been special. Fooling reporters since I was eleven? Check. Dying at sixteen from a Wasting Curse placed on the Malfoy line without telling either of my fathers the real reason? Check. Having conversations with Death about Death? Check, motherfucker. Special, I tell you.”   
  
There’s a contemplative hum. Followed by a thoughtful, “Yes. You might just be.”

Scorpius knows if he had been alive, he’d have blushed right about now. There’s no proper explanation for that, but he would have. Honestly, with how easily he colours, he might as well have been a _virgin_.   
  
“In any case,” he says hurriedly, shutting down that line of thought before it evolves into something unmanageable, “you were saying something about explaining why you’re here?”

A hush descends for a minute. “There’s something you must understand,” Death says at last, “before I explain anything else.”

“Yeah?”

“You call me Death,” they say, “but that is just the part of me that is easier to grasp.”

Scorpius stares in consternation. “Okay, mate, I don’t–”  
  
“I am also Life. The beginning. The genesis. Existence.”

_“What?”_

  
The shifting, watery features are suddenly solid, as though they’d been that way all along, and Scorpius gasps. Dominique Weasley is sitting in front of him, auburn hair done up in two French plaits. She looks just as he remembers her– full of youthful beauty, a smattering of freckles on her nose. He remembers her lying pale and still in the coffin, Fleur’s wrecked sobs and Bill’s trembling hands as they lowered her into the soil– Molly’s screams that she was only twelve.   
  
“Dom?” He whispers. “Dom, it’s _you?_ What, I don’t understand–”

Except it’s not, and Sirius Black is sitting across from him– how could he have ever thought _him_ to be _her_ – looking every bit the rugged, handsome man from the photo albums Harry had shown him. His smile is like a beam of light, charming like a revelation and Scorpius finds traces of Father in the aristocratic line of the nose, in the slender, tapering fingers and the beautiful eyes.   
  
Scorpius blinks, and it’s not Sirius anymore, but instead Grandpa Arthur, looking every bit the jovial, happy man who had shown Scorpius the wonders of teddy bears and muggle taps.  
  
He blinks again and the bloke in front of him has been pulled straight out of a Merlin chocolate frog card, with his white flowing hair and his green robes. Merlin really was a Slytherin, Scorpius thinks hysterically, before the features change again, and Scorpius is looking into a kaleidoscope of men, women, children, babies, everyone known and unknown who has ever died.

He blinks once more, and the undefinable face of what he called Death is back, swirling and indeterminate.   
  
“Do you understand?” they whisper, and the voice this time isn’t the steady, indefinite one he’s grown accustomed to hearing, but a soft echo of thousands of voiced whispering low. “Do you understand what happens when you leave this place?”

“There is no leaving,” Scorpius says, voice hoarse and lips cold. “There is only becoming. Becoming _you._ ”   
  
_Why are you still here? Why am I still here?_

“From the minute you are introduced into this world, I pull at you. It isn’t something I want, it isn’t something I abhor. It simply is how it is. I give you life, and I seek to end it. It is purpose. Both yours, and mine. But sometimes, there is a pull in the middle– I am the beginning and end, but the middle is yours– that is stronger than mine. It keeps you from the merge. You merge first with what seeks to keep you so close, and then you merge with me.”

“So,” Scorpius says slowly, not allowing the hysteria to set in, “even if you wanted, you couldn’t transform into me right now? No matter what you do?”  
  
They shake their head. “I couldn’t.”

“But I’m dead.”   
  
“Yes.”   
  
“And there’s no going back.”

“No.”   
  
“And I wait here, till whichever one of them is pulling me dies.”

“Yes.”   
  
“Fucking _Christ.”_

“He didn’t do that.”

Scorpius buries his face in his hands and groans. “Do you have any idea how bloody awful it is to die and still not know what happens after Death?”   
  
There’s no response. When Scorpius looks up, they’re smiling.   
  
“Yes, haha, what a laugh for _Existence_ itself. I still understand nothing! What planet do you exist in? What happens to all my thoughts once I… merge or whatever? Will I ever meet those people or do you just pick and choose which one to be when it suits your fancy? And… and… what does being Master of Death have anything to do with it? What does being Master of Death even _mean?_ ”   
  
“I am not corporeal. I have no form. Therefore, under normal circumstances, I might have existed anywhere, in any space, at any time, in all of infinity. I am but a thought. When someone dies, they merge into me. Else, they wait and they– I explained this already. But ever since Harry Potter has reclaimed his mastery of me, I am tied to him. Everything– genesis, existence, death– is tied to him.”

“You’re telling me you’ve been here since he was, what? Seventeen?”

Death shakes their head. “I am telling you I have been here since he reclaimed mastery. Found the Elder Wand. Found the Stone. Covered them in the Cloak.”

If Scorpius had a beating heart, this would be when it would have skipped a beat.   
  
“When did he do that?”   
  
“Recently.”

Realisation descends upon Scorpius like grey dawn after a stormy night.  
  
“He’s making sure no one else ever claims mastery,” he whispers. “That’s the only way to nullify the wand, right? If the owner dies without ownership of it being transferred? If the Master dies the Master?”

He looks towards Death, and stares into the indeterminate eyes. If he takes them for what they are, they aren’t ever-changing or even multicoloured. They’re a swirling abyss of normalcy devolving into the madness of infinity. It starts off as an iris of speckled shades that narrows into a pinprick that isn’t black as much as a vacuum. If Scorpius looks into them for too long, the realities of infinity and time will break his mind.   
  
“He said he’d think about being the Master of Death when the time came to die for the last time,” Scorpius recalls, thinking back to when Skeeter had published her piece with insurmountable proof and comments from ‘reputed resources’. Head Auror Proudfoot had asked Harry Potter to issue a formal statement regarding the claims to keep the rumours from spiralling out of control. That means…  
  
“He’s preparing to die for the last time, with no chances of coming back.”  
  
Scorpius watches Draco’s Adam’s apple bob with every swallow. The house is dark. Harry isn’t in.   
  
“My dad is going to kill himself.”


	4. Chapter 4

Breakfast isn’t something they do.   
  
That happened sometime around the Court Case That Sent Everything To Living Hell. A little before it, perhaps. Definitely not after. The morning they both dressed in their formal robes to go into the Wizengamot meeting, staring into separate mirrors, kissing Scorpius on the head without looking each other in the eye and going over their respective case files, Harry knows for certain they did not sit down to eat together.   
  
He remembers how much they used to talk when it was still something of a ritual for them.   
  
Draco would be inelegantly shovelling food into his mouth, the green case files signifying a pro-bono open in front of him.   
  
“These Wizarding corporations,” he would say, pointing to a section in the file with a contemptuous finger (only Draco could make even hurried pointing look contemptuous), “they think they can get away with fucking over anything.”   
  
Harry would teasingly raise his eyebrows, sipping his coffee slowly. His schedule wasn’t in tandem with Draco’s, and he had a six year old son whom he exploited mercilessly as an excuse for the days he was late to the office. It gave him the time to watch Draco in his element– coming down harsh upon the evils of Wizarding society in unparliamentary language which he later filtered in court to be scathing checks on the perpetrator of the day.   
  
Same fire, same viciousness, just another outlet. Harry loved it.  
  
“What did this one do?”   
  
“Killed twelve people with a Blasting Curse in a bookmaking factory. They’re passing off as a hazard of the job. Honestly, the Kiss wasn’t harsh enough for these bloody monsters.”   
  
“How on earth does _bookmaking–_ ”  
  
“Trust me, Potter, you don’t want to know.”

On the days Draco didn’t have a case, they would wake up a little earlier and instead of chucking three slices of bread in the toaster and hoping the egg wasn’t undercooked, they’d cook. Harry would cook shirtless and Draco would be scandalised _(do you really want oil on your nipples Potter? In the bad way? The only bad way in which that happens?)_ and when Scorpius would wake up, he would giggle at the way Draco kept muttering and wiping away the licks of flour on Harry’s abs or the traces of oil on his sternum.   
  
Draco wasn’t much of a cook, but he hung around chatting about Scorpius’ latest antics and Blaise’s latest conquests and his latest client wanting to feel him up despite him being happily married and that being a pretty regular fact in the papers.   
  
“Can you believe she told me she knows what it must be like to be married to a celebrity?” he had asked Harry, with his arms around Harry’s bare waist as bacon sizzled in the pan. “Just because she’s trying to divorce Anthony Filibuster doesn’t mean everyone is!”   
  
“Who the bloody hell is Anthony Filibuster?” Harry had asked, turning the circle of Draco’s arms with a snort.   
  
“Exactly!” Draco had said, throwing his arms up, and Harry had begun to laugh, pulling Draco down by the collar of his shirt into a messy kiss.   
  
But on that day… the day of the Court Case That Sent Everything to Living Hell, breakfast had been the last thing on their minds.   
  
On his worst days, Harry finds himself wondering what would have happened if they’d maintained the ritual.   
  
It isn’t often that he understands Pureblood traditions, but on some days he understands the sentiment behind some of them.   
  
Familiarity. Stability. Hope in something bigger than yourself.   
  
There’s no God in Wizarding culture, so they trust in magic. Worship it. Purebloods are just… religious in that way. And just as with every other religion, there are some who are fanatics who give the whole thing a bad rep. Being married to one of those (a Pureblood, not a fanatic– well. An ex fanatic of sorts) helped Harry see the best of it.   
  
Arguably, also the worst, but like he really doesn’t think about that unless he’s having a bad day.   
  
He’s been having quite a few bad days as of late, though, so he thinks about it quite often. The court case. Breakfast. Draco. His wedding ring.   
  
He measures time in light and dark.   
  
Well, to be technical, that is how everyone measures time, but everyone else also checks their watch to see if it is five am or five pm or perhaps one pm when they can take their break finally, stretching limbs over their heads. Harry measures time in whether it is dark outside or still sunny when he wakes up, and how long he needs to be awake for his body to accept the need to sleep again.   
  
He’s taken three weeks off work and he intends to spend them all sleeping.   
  
In his dreams, Draco still talks about Anthony Filibuster and Florentina Fortescue’s endeavours to make her father’s recipes public which are being thwarted by Florian II. They talk while Scorpius plays with his toy broomstick in the garden and they talk while Scorpius attempts to climb Harry’s foot like a tree.   
  
Sometimes they don’t talk with words. Sometimes, their bodies do all the talking, and it’s a glorious, sweat-slicked mess of muttered curses and endearments and Draco’s hands in his hair, on his biceps, on his lower back, Draco’s eyes fluttering shut with every push of Harry’s hips into his body, and the salty sweetness of his skin filling Harry’s mouth with a taste he can’t forget even when he jerks awake.   
  
Draco doesn’t want him in life anymore, but in dreams, he can’t get enough.   
  
Scorpius isn’t alive anymore, but in dreams, he smiles– Harry’s little boy, his sweet child– like he never acquired that Wasting Curse from ‘genetic predisposition’ and Harry can touch him and kiss him and lull him to sleep without keeping one eye open for atrophy cramps.

In dreams, there are no papers, no court cases, no journalists sending him owls trying to extract a double meaning from ‘no comment’.   
  
In dreams, Harry is happy, and in life he is not, so Harry measures time in light and darkness and the space between them is filled by relief.   
  
But, breakfast.   
  
After Scorpius… passed away, Harry has been tying up his loose ends in his waking moments.   
  
Yesterday evening he met with a solicitor to draw up a will. He’s left half the Black vaults to Hermione’s charitable organisations. He’s left the other half to Rose, his goddaughter for her to do with as she pleases. She’s the sort of person money will never be wasted on, only allowed to grow into a thriving, useful network helping more people.   
  
Mother’s daughter, that one.   
  
He leaves everything else in his possession to Draco Malfoy.   
  
The solicitor had raised an eyebrow when he thought Harry wasn’t looking.   
  
Harry’s a damn Auror– a bloody good one at that– he’s _always_ looking.

He knows it would be a waste to leave Ron anything. It would never be touched, only cried over. He knows better than to try and leave Hugo anything– he doesn’t want Draco to hate him even more in death by trying to take over his godson. Ginny probably wouldn’t even get the owl letting her know of what she’s inherited, and even if she did, she wouldn’t know what to do with it in the Amazon rainforests.   
  
And unlike his relationship with Draco, their relationships with Draco are all still thriving. If they’re ever in need, they’re more than well provided for by the terms of his will which leave Draco in charge. Draco might pretend to not give a damn about Ronald Weasley, especially after the caustic divorce with Hermione, but there’s a fondness there he can’t deny. It was born sometime when it had dawned on them both that Harry Potter was independently important in both their lives and it was in everyone’s best interests for them to not throw beer at each other in the Leaky.   
  
It hadn’t died even when Harry Potter stopped being independently important, though they both liked to pretend it had.   
  
Draco adores Hugo and Ginny, so of course, there’s no worry there.   
  
And Harry has no living progeny, so that’s well sorted.   
  
The vaults were a loose end.   
  
The Hallows were loose ends. Tying them up was more complicated than the vaults, but it’s fascinating what a few favours and a little goodwill will do for you.   
  
McGonagall had thought he wanted to visit Dumbledore’s tomb after Scorpius’ death for emotional purposes. A soul seeking talk with a more familiar tombstone. She’d asked, with a withered hand pressed against his shoulder if he would like to speak to the portrait in her office. He’d shaken his head, and hadn’t even had to ask for privacy when she had nodded and walked away.   
  
He’d withdrawn the Hallow dispassionately from the tangled, skeletal remains of the Headmaster, sealed the tomb back up and had stared at the Elder Wand with a sort of fascinated horror. He’d tucked it into his pocket after a while, sat there a little longer for appearance’s sake and had then left, bidding the headmistress goodbye.  
  
The Stone had required another special Hogwarts sanction granted to him immediately. He knows quite well what Neville had thought when he had accompanied Harry into the clearing in the Forbidden Forest.   
  
“This is where you… died, did you, mate?” Neville had asked, his sympathy rolling off him in waves. Harry had inclined his head curtly.   
  
Neville had sighed.   
  
“I’ll leave you to it, then.”

Once he’d heard Neville’s footsteps fade into the forest, he’d dropped to his knees and sought the Stone out with the Wand.   
  
Hallows attract. It had taken him a few seconds.   
  
The urge to roll it, to see his son side by side with his parents was tempting. But it was too dangerous, and it wasn’t a privilege he should enjoy alone. Instead, he wrapped up the two Hallows in the third and with another wave to Neville and a kiss on Minerva’s cheek, he left Hogwarts for the last time as the Master of Death.   
  
There are no Hallows without a Master. If the Master dies of natural causes, Death is Master once more and all is right with the world. 

The vault. The Hallows.   
  
There is a third loose end.   
  
Closer to a scarf cut in half, actually. No single thread that could be tugged, just an unravelling mess of torn fabric that had once been something real and beautiful.   
  
Draco’s sitting at the breakfast table, legs propped up on it, the newspaper clutched in his white-knuckled grip. He’s not reading it, Harry can tell, just staring. Giving himself a purpose till he can leave for work and throw himself into whatever cases he’s allowed to pile up during his leave of absence.  
  
It’s going to be a difficult conversation, but it’s to be had.   
  
He nears the table and notices Draco’s knee give an involuntary twitch. The newspaper slides a little before Draco rights it and clears his throat, and Harry feels weak.   
  
It hurt when he rips the ring off his finger. It hurts even more when he places it on the table.   
  
The same table he’d placed it on when he’d proposed.  
  
“I’m not going to put it on you,” he’d said then. “It’s not an ornament, it’s your choice.”   
  
And Draco had chosen him.   
  
The newspaper shifts. Draco looks down at the ring, his expression a blank mask.   
  
They both stare down at the seven gleaming grey sapphires. Long minutes pass. Neither move.   
  
“Will you be handing me the papers then?” Draco asks, breaking the hush. It’s sudden. Harry startles.   
  
“Of course not,” Harry says, after he processes the words. “Unless you want me to.”

“If I wanted to divorce you, Harry, I would have done it a long time ago, not waited for our son’s death.”   
  
Harry flinches at the sharp tone and sharper words. Draco doesn’t soften.   
  
“No, I know. I just… there’s really nothing tying you to me anymore. So if you want to leave… which you obviously do, because you’ve bought a flat and everything… you can do it for good.”

“I can,” says Draco, enunciating very clearly, his accent sharpening with every syllable, “do whatever I please. And I have _never_ needed your permission.” 

Harry resists the urge to bang his head on the table.   
  
“Draco, just, please, just this once, take me at my word instead of dredging up double meanings. I’m not giving you permission, just asking you to consider.”

“Why don’t you hand me the papers if you’re so insistent on getting a divorce? Piece on the side, Harry? Someone you want to marry who wants the final ties severed now that all the common factors have been eliminated?”   
  
Harry pinches the bridge of his nose.   
  
“There’s no one else, Draco.”   
  
“Pity,” Draco says. If words were knives, Draco would have bled him dry by now.   
  
“I don’t… frankly, I don’t see the point of me asking for a divorce. I barely have grounds. You’re the bloody barrister, you know how to phrase these things yourself. You could just… I don’t know, write something up, sign it and hand it to me and when you move out, you’ll be a free man in every sense of the word.”   
  
“I _am_ a free man.”   
  
“A free, _married_ man.”  
  
“And if that was something I didn’t want to be, I wouldn’t be.”   
  
“You’re saying you _want_ to be married to me?” Harry asks, incredulously, blowing his fringe out of his face to stare at Draco better.   
  
“You are the _father_ ,” Draco says through gritted teeth and furious eyes, “of my _child._ ”   
  
_“A child who’s dead!”_ Harry screams, and a hush descends in the aftermath of it.   
  
Without a word, Draco stands up. Harry expects him to leave, but he doesn’t. Instead, in one move, he leans over the table and picks up the ring Harry has left on the table.   
  
In his fingers, it looks _right._ It’s the only place it will ever look right if it isn’t on Harry’s left hand.   
  
Harry remembers leaving it with Draco when he went on his more dangerous missions, and Draco placing it reverentially before him when he returned. He remembers picking it up while looking Draco in the eyes, charged and heated looks passing between them. He remembers slipping it on, feeling complete after days, sometimes weeks of feeling like a part of him was missing.   
  
He remembers falling into bed with Draco, limbs intertwining, bodies flushing and the stones on their rings gleaming like each other’s eyes.   
  
“Will you be wanting this back?” Draco asks. “Or should I store it in the vaults?”   
  
Harry stares. It looks so innocent, just a circle of metal.   
  
It’s every worthwhile choice Harry has ever made, and the weight of it is crushing sometimes.   
  
“Give it back,” he says, and is mortified by the hoarseness in his voice. Or he would be if he cared.   
  
Draco slides it back across the table. It almost falls off, coming to rest on the edge.   
  
Harry picks it up, slides it on and abruptly walks away, leaving Draco standing in the kitchen, newspaper forgotten and face pale.   
  
–   
  
“Why won’t they just… separate?” Death asks, and Scorpius sighs.   
  
“I wish I knew for sure.”   
  
“Humans are complicated,” Death observes, and Scorpius laughs. It’s a harsh, bitter sound and he wonders how it hasn’t ripped through this fragile fabric between his world and his parents’. Though in truth, it isn’t quite that hard to understand– if his existence was to rip through their bubble, it would have happened when he was alive.   
  
“Are they…” Death begins, and breaks off. Scorpius looks up, wondering if it’s hesitancy or second thought, only for Death to look generally perplexed across his changing appearances, as though grasping for words that aren’t there. “Are they…” they begin again, “intimate with _others_?”   
  
Scorpius snorts. He wonders what it says about him that it’s genuine mirth this time.   
  
“I wish,” he says, rolling his eyes. There’s fondness there that he won’t admit to. “Would do Father a world of good. Might even sway Dad if he could swallow down his guilt and just _enjoy it_.”   
  
“But they are also not intimate with… each other?”   
  
Scorpius shakes his head. “It’s been a while since they even shared the same bedroom.”   
  
“Who are they intimate with, then?”   
  
The question pulls at threads of longing Scorpius wasn’t aware were still lingering in his heart. A torn cobweb that clings with its last strength to the ceiling.   
  
“No one,” he murmurs, looking down at the grain of the wooden dining table. “That’s the whole point. They’re much too lonely.”


	5. Chapter 5

“I’m trying to gather up the loose ends,” Harry says, sitting on the floor, eyes closed, wedding ring clenched in the palm of his hand. “But there are more than I can count.”   
  
The picture of Scorpius lying beside him doesn’t respond.   
  
It’s from happier times. Scorpius is smiling, a fleck of chocolate on his chin, silver-grey eyes shining with the light of the stars that live on after his death.   
  
The stars he was named for, the stars he died by.  
  
But even that blessed smile is not the only reason Harry keeps this one closer than the others.   
  
He remembers the day it had been clicked a little too well– both him and Draco home from work without much to do save watch their son play and poke fun at each other while stealing kisses. He’d been figuring out how to work a Muggle camera back then, fiddling with the controls, trying out different versions and modes in an attempt to click something that wasn’t either unfocused or overexposed.   
  
Draco had been feeding Scorpius chocolate pudding while telling him a story from work (most of those weren’t child friendly, but the ones that were, endlessly entertained Scorpius who would often ask a couple days later about what happened to Daedalus Diggory after he filed a case against a goose), and Scorpius’ eyes had been sparkling so bright that Harry had known this was a moment he needed to keep preserved forever.   
  
He’d called out to Scorpius, pressing down on the shutter at the precise moment Scorpius had turned, charming grin place. The picture had been delightful, the lighting perfect, the grin heartbreaking in its resemblance to Draco’s genuine smiles.   
  
Draco had sneaked up behind him as he stared awestruck by the force of his son’s beauty, pulling him closer by the shoulders, and gasping softly. It had been a moment of star-struck realisation that they two of them would risk their lives for this chocolate covered menace in a heartbeat.   
  
“I’ll never love anyone as much as I love him,” Draco had said, and Harry had tensed up immediately. “No, Harry, not like that, I’m so sorry, my love–”  
  
“No,” Harry had rushed to interrupt. “I know what you mean. I agree.”   
  
Draco had dropped his forehead onto Harry’s shoulder, chuckled softly and had moved away to fetch a washcloth to wipe away the chocolate Scorpius was tangling into his blond hair.   
  
“How many loose ends did you have left?” he asks the picture, tracing the line of the plump cheek. “How many did you tie up?”   
  
He remembers Scorpius asking for notebooks when he still had the capability to write. Remembers tying feet after feet of parchment to the legs of myriad owls. Owls who returned with smaller missives that Scorpius would tuck away under his pillow.   
  
“Don’t Anne Frank me after this,” he would joke, laughing a little before coughing up blood. “I don’t want the Wizarding World judging my goodbyes. Promise me, Father.”   
  
“I wouldn’t _dare_ ,” Draco had said, wiping off the flecks of blood from Scorpius’ chin and neck without flinching. “Lest you come back to haunt me.”   
  
It had reminded him of the chocolate pudding in the worst possible way.   
  
“I know you thought we were a loose end,” he sighs, letting his head fall back onto the edge of the bed. “I know you wanted to see us solve some part of this before you left.” He chokes out a laugh that sounds far closer to a strangled sob. “I wish we could have given you that. Even if it was a divorce. There would be something then that wasn’t this drifting from one moment to the next unsure of everything. Something concrete.”   
  
Scorpius smiles in the picture, guileless and innocent and healthy, and the tears are unstoppable.   
  
– 

Draco has been asked countless times to divorce Harry. Draco has also been asked countless times by countless people why he does _not_ divorce Harry.   
  
Every time he has either imperiously told the buggers asking to fuck off and stay out of his personal life, or shrugged ineloquently and gone back to other topics.   
  
The only person he bothered to tell was his mother, when she was lying in bed, some ‘mystery illness’ a flinty eyed Healer had told him that was wrecking her body. He’d told her in the quiet calm of twilight descending in Wiltshire, the windows darkening with every passing moment. The confession had twisted like a knife, but it had set him free from the haunting secrecy he forced himself to maintain.   
  
She wanted to see him happy, he knew. He’d closed his eyes when she had gestured to the ring on his left hand two years ago and told him, “You are not happy, Draco.”   
  
Draco had shaken his head in response despite her not having phrased it like a question, tracing the soft wrinkle on her cheek. She’d been youthful even a few months ago, but the illness had bled her dry of vitality and brightness in record time. Her age caught up to her, and once unmarred skin had crinkled like old paper.   
  
He knows she’d been thankful she was dying when it had finally happened. Malfoy vanity is unparalleled, but Black vanity is unsurpassed.   
  
“Then why stay?”   
  
He’d smiled. The words he’d carefully tried to secret away in the darker corners of his heart spilled from his lips when he made no attempt to push them back down into their casket, “Why stay with father though he led you into the trap of a genocidal maniac, mother?”   
  
Something had cleared in Narcissa’s eyes. Even on her deathbed, she’d arched eyebrows with the grace of a queen bestowing her gaze upon an errant subject.   
  
“You still love him?”

Draco had opened his eyes and met hers. He’d known it was answer enough.   
  
“You could love again,” she’d said, her thin hand coming up to brush a lock of hair out of his eyes. “This doesn’t have to be the end.”   
  
Draco had bent to kiss the top of her head. “We’re Malfoys, mother. You know how much of an impossibility that is.”   
  
Narcissa hadn’t said anything.   
  
She’d died three days later, his secrets twined with hers in the cavern of her thin, frail chest and he had kissed her cold hand farewell before drawing the white shroud over her heart and his confessions. 

Since then, vulnerability had been reserved for Scorpius and shame had been synonymous with love.   
  
Sometimes when he was alone with Scorpius, his son would look at him, dead in the eyes and say in a tone so matter of fact that Draco would be torn between laughter and desperation, “You need to get out more, Father. Meet other people. You can’t kiss a file, and though I’m sure nothing would please you better, you can’t make love to the law.”   
  
“I’ll have you know I can kiss a file just fine,” Draco had said in response, ignoring Scorpius’ slightly repulsed eye-roll. “I kiss all the ones I win shut.”   
  
“My mistake,” Scorpius had said, poking him in the arm. “Files can’t kiss you _back_. It’s all unrequited, Father.”   
  
And wasn’t that ironic, him hitting the nail on the head with the accuracy of a Ravenclaw prodigy without even knowing.   
  
He’s married to his work and his husband, but his work can’t kiss him back and his husband probably won’t.   
  
He’s been watching Harry fall out of love with him for years now. Pulling away, drawing up his walls and throwing himself into work to the point of self-destructive hours spent cooped up in his office is the only solution he’s found.  
  
He’s being selfish, he knows, by not handing Harry the papers. He should set Harry free. He should let Harry leave his memories of a dead son and a dead love behind, move on and fall in love again.   
  
Harry’s heart is so big, he would undoubtedly be capable of finding love again.   
  
A young wizard of forty two, the Saviour of the Wizarding World, an attractive, kind man– the minute Harry was single again, witches and wizards would be falling over themselves trying to catch his eye.   
  
Not that they don’t already, but as a free man, Harry would feel no guilt when meeting those yearning gazes. A crowded bar with a pretty bird on a barstool waiting for a drink to be bought, a Ministry event with some bloke in a Muggle three-piece entertaining Harry with tales of Quidditch matches during the boring speeches Harry fidgets through. An old friend in a coffee shop, them finding out they have more shared experiences and commonalities than they’d ever thought to explore in Hogwarts.   
  
There are endless possibilities for Harry to find love again, and the only thing holding him back is seven sapphires set in platinum, a shackle around his ring finger and Draco’s absolute refusal to hand him divorce papers.   
  
Harry knew what he was getting into when Draco had told him, _I am forever. No one comes after me. This is the choice you have to make for the rest of your life.  
  
_ Or at least that is what he tells himself every time Harry asks him if he wants a divorce and he says no. It is the one truth he has centred his life around, and he is unwilling to let it go.   
  
–   
  
Scorpius doesn’t remember the case that ripped his family apart.   
  
It’s understandable, Aunt Hermione had assured him with a gentle hand on his arm after one of his most vicious panic attacks. He’d only been seven, after all.   
  
From the iteration of the event in the papers and his relentless interrogation of Hermione and Blaise on his bad days, he knows the facts of the case just fine, but he wishes he could remember how Harry and Draco had acted around each other in those months of silence during the trial.   
  
Had they looked away from each other when caught staring across the table? Had Harry fiddled with his ring? Had Draco aborted an attempt to reach for Harry when he’d seen the dead look in Harry’s eyes?   
  
Scorpius wonders if things could have been different if he remembered them.   
  
He means it when he says that there is no place for shame in the life of a Potter-Malfoy scion– if he’d been able to remember the slightest hints of buried love that folded itself in overshadowed by the looming demon of pride, he’d have pushed his fathers with bald comments towards each other. Set them up on blind dates, locked them in a room together, that sort of thing. And if those didn’t work, he’d have sat them down and told them plain as day that they should at least talk.   
  
But Scorpius only remembers affectionate touches and endearments fading away into a deathly silence that combusted occasionally into vitriol and red hot anger. In a few years’ time, that too petered out and their palatial house was the haunt of a ghost of love, mouth open in a soundless scream.   
  
He’d thought they’d stayed married for his sake.   
  
He’d debated in his fading moments that if he weren’t dying whether they’d have severed the bond by now, leaving the rings in a forgotten drawer in an attempt to move on.   
  
Most of the time, he’d answered himself in the affirmative.   
  
But now, as he watches Draco cling to the ring on his finger like a child and Harry’s desperate attempts to sort out the unravelling threads of his life, he wonders whether he was ever correct in those assumptions.   
  
_I love him_ , Harry had murmured half asleep and half delirious to Scorpius’ picture, unaware that the real Scorpius was sitting and listening to him with a dead heart plummeting lower and lower. _I love him so much it’s eating me alive.  
  
Harry, _Draco had begun on a sheet of parchment, drunk and lost, before scratching it out and tossing the balled sheet away.   
  
_I have nothing to say to him_ , Draco had told Hermione when she had sat down beside him and asked if he wanted to just talk it out with Harry. Divorced and in a good mental place with no romantic entanglements pulling at her from any side, Hermione Granger pressed the point with both Harry and Draco time and time again.   
  
Just like always, this time too was entirely futile, Draco’s stubbornness, abrupt subject changes and blank stare winning out over her persistence.   
  
Scorpius, perching on the arm of his chair had buried his head in his hands. Death, silent and watchful as ever had not asked why.   
  
Maybe they too were beginning to catch on.   
  
Everyday, Scorpius curses Gregor Selwyn’s name with vitriolic passion uncharacteristic of himself.  
  
Gregor Selwyn had been a Death Eater placed on house arrest with a diminished sentence for his cooperation after the Second Wizarding War. When Scorpius, with a sick interest clawing at his heart had gone through the papers of 1999, tracing the angry lines of Harry’s form in the pictures the Prophet printed, he’d discovered Selwyn had made the headlines for a week. His intel led to the capture of almost the entire Snatchers gang and brought Fenrir Greyback to his knees. Just for that, if he hadn’t been a branded Death Eater, he might have been nominated for an Order of Merlin.   
  
He was placed under house arrest with Ministry protection, and Scorpius had later discovered that when Harry Potter had been a Junior Auror, he’d been placed as Selwyn’s guard for his first mission.   
  
Scorpius now knows that whatever he had seen at the time had started a deep burning suspicion in Harry’s gut that led him to almost obsessively trail Selwyn’s activities when his sentence of house arrest ended. He’d been convinced that Selwyn was up to something nefarious, though none of the higher ups ever signed off on opening an investigation.   
  
As Harry rose in the ranks of the Auror Corps, he could gradually dedicate less time to the informal investigation. His relationship with Draco was in its flourishing stages and he could only focus on an obsessive hunch for so long. But he never let it go, and more importantly, never explained what had encouraged the hunch in the first place.   
  
Except, one month after Scorpius’ seventh birthday, Harry had arrested Selwyn, dragged him out of the house in shackles with a murder charge to his name and an allegation that he was attempting the resurrection of Voldemort.   
  
No one had been willing to go against Harry Potter’s testimony in court. No lawyer worth his salt wanted to tarnish the reputation of the Saviour of the Wizarding World.   
  
But Selwyn had asked for Draco Malfoy and after a fifteen minute unsupervised conversation, he’d taken the case.

Harry Potter’s _husband_ took the case. 

Draco won Selwyn the case. He was sent out into the Wizarding World and given the status of a free man.   
  
The Wizarding World rioted. The papers published article after article, some claiming Draco was still keeping his Death Eater alliances active, some claiming Harry Potter was losing the plot. Some went wild, theorising Harry and Draco were working together to resurrect Voldemort and had pulled this stunt to draw suspicion away from the reality by broadcasting it to the public.   
  
Some claimed their marital issues were ruining their work lives.   
  
Through it all, neither Draco nor Harry issued any statements. Draco did not confirm what Selwyn had told him. Harry did not relay what had led him to arrest Selwyn under those charges in the first place.   
  
Behind closed doors, there were no words exchanged, no explanations provided. What used to be a happy and carefree space created by two men in love for their little family quickly became a dilapidated ruin of memories and faint echoes of laughter.   
  
Scorpius remembers the cold feeling that had grasped him when he was seven, looking at his parents retire to separate bedrooms after dinner.   
  
He remembers digging his fingernails into his palms to keep from running to Harry’s door and ask him why they could not all lie down together sometime like they used to a couple nights a week.   
  
He remembers finally understanding that those days were never coming back, remembers blocking out the sound of muffled yelling in the kitchen to focus on schoolwork from the muggle elementary school Draco and Harry had agreed to send him to prior to Hogwarts.   
  
For almost a decade, Scorpius has told himself they fell out of love when Draco told a jury that Harry Potter’s personal obsession with Gregor Selwyn’s case had led to a misconception and a baseless arrest. That they fell out of love when the furious witness Harry Potter had told the Chief Warlock that Gregor Selwyn’s personal ties to the Malfoy family were blurring his understanding of the law.   
  
That they had fallen out of love, when wands were raised in the courtroom, Draco and Harry facing each other down with jaws clenched in rage and eyes barely disguising the depth of hurt in them.   
  
Except, he watches Draco hesitantly bring the ring to his lips, a hair’s breadth away from his skin, knuckles white around the silver band. Watches him put it back down. Watches him raise it again, close his eyes, and kiss it with all the gentleness of a man bidding a lover adieu in a casket. 

Harry blankly stares at photo albums of Scorpius and Draco for hours, shut up in his bedroom. He traces the lines of Draco’s smiles and exasperated eye rolls just as frequently as he kisses Scorpius’ chubby cheeks in the pictures.   
  
And Scorpius knows, with the astonishment of a Ravenclaw, that he had been _wrong.  
  
_ They lost everything– respect, trust, patience, hope, when those words were said in the courtroom. They lost any shreds or residual bits of those emotions left during the ceaseless fights in the kitchen when they threw words at each other like sharpened knives.   
  
But through it all, they never lost sight of that aching, wanting, all-consuming love.

And love, without stability, Scorpius thinks, watching Harry open his wardrobe and trail his fingers over the smooth silk of the invisibility cloak, is fatal.


	6. Chapter 6

The day Harry kills himself, he wakes up in the morning to make Draco a cup of coffee. 

Scorpius who spends the nights pestering Death for slideshows of the people they are, startles when Harry clatters down the stairs, bleary eyed and yawning.   
  
“What’s he doing?” he asks aloud, and Death shrugs.   
  
“Am I to know?”   
  
Scorpius does not answer. Instead he watches Harry pull out his cup from the top shelf and after a moment’s thought, Draco’s too. Side by side, they look innocuous, a couple’s morning coffee, a touch of love, a dash of everyday romance.   
  
Given context, it feels like Harry has finally lost the last vestiges of control over himself.   
  
Harry mixes in his sugar, and adds cream to Draco’s (Scorpius is surprised by how well Harry remembers the way Draco takes his coffee), humming a jaunty tune under his breath. He leans against the counter, closing his eyes and sighing gently at the first sip of what has to be burning liquid.   
  
With one finger, he traces the rim of Draco’s cup, before lifting it and putting it on the table under a warming charm, where Draco will be sure to see it the minute he steps into the kitchen.   
  
Harry opens the window to the owl with the daily newspaper, and once he takes a quick look at the headlines, he folds it back up and puts it under Draco’s coffee cup. 

Then he clatters back up the stairs, leaving the cup and the paper where Draco will find it the second he steps into the kitchen.   
  
Scorpius follows him up, taking the stairs two at a time. He reaches the door to Harry’s bedroom, peeps in through the crack. Harry’s on his knees in front of the wardrobe, gathering up the cloak and what Scorpius assumes are the wand and the stone wrapped up in it. He’s folding them into a leather pouch that by no means should be able to fit anything larger than a stone without Extendable Charms.   
  
There’s a trembling to Harry’s fingers that no Auror worth his salt should have. It’s an erratic, arrhythmic jerk that patters Harry’s fingers almost involuntarily against the firm leather. There’s a glint in his eyes that sends a phantom chill racing down Scorpius’ spine.   
  
Or perhaps it’s just the sun on his glasses. 

He turns away as Harry begins stripping off, changing into the crumpled shirt and jeans he draws out from the haphazard depths of his cupboard. Scorpius recognises it as the one Draco had gifted Harry for his thirty fifth birthday. One of the last gifts between them.   
  
One of the last broken promises.   
  
He watches Harry hesitate in the middle of the bedroom, fully dressed with the leather pouch tucked into his pocket. For the first time this morning, he looks lost. Off kilter. Like a ship on high seas without a sail. His fingers flex in the air, and his hands reach for something– someone– who isn’t there.   
  
Who hasn’t been there for a while now.   
  
He turns back, pulls open a drawer, and Scorpius knows by the curl of his biceps, that he’s cradling the picture of the three of them together that he keeps secreted away from Draco’s supposedly derisive gaze. Not that Draco would ever step into this room– but in the rare occasion that he might, Harry doesn’t want to take any chances. The picture, it’s a testament to a weakness Harry couldn’t afford when Scorpius had been ill, and one that is all-consuming in its shamefulness now that Scorpius is dead.   
  
“I love you,” Scorpius hears, a low murmured whisper that feels too private for him to witness. “I’m sorry.” There’s a pause for a few seconds followed by a low humourless laugh.   
  
“If there is a life after this one, let me meet you in it, Draco Malfoy.”   
  
Scorpius is certain tears would have obscured his vision by now, if he’d retained the ability to cry. The ache in his empty chest intensifies.  
  
–   
  
When Draco finds the coffee cup and the newspaper, he stubs his toe on the edge of the table in his surprised distraction. Fairly certain that Harry would not poison him, he takes a sip. The taste throws him back seven years when they were still going strong, still so desperately in love, still sleeping in each other’s arms.   
  
It’s perfect, just the way he likes it.   
  
Uncertain and wary, he stares at the cup, wondering what Harry is up to. If it is a gesture of reconciliation, it is too little, too late. If it is a reminder of Harry’s presence in his life, it is unnecessary.   
  
As though Draco could ever forget.   
  
He drinks half the cup standing there and pondering, before abruptly choosing to pay Harry a visit in his room.   
  
When he knocks on the door, there’s no sound from within, so Draco tries the handle, unsurprised when it swings open. Harry had never enjoyed locking doors.   
  
“Reminds me too much of PIvet Drive,” he’d muttered into the crook of Draco’s neck one night. “I want to know the whole space is ours, that there are no limits to where I can and can’t be.”   
  
But right now, Harry isn’t in the bedroom.   
  
He looks around, taking note of the way the bed is still mostly done, as though Harry has spent the night here, but has not bothered to rest.   
  
His heart clenches with warm affection and worry– Harry’s sleeplessness is all too familiar to him.   
  
But if Harry isn’t here or in the kitchen, there’s nowhere else he could be, so he must have left. Confusion creeps up Draco’s spine, wrapping his brain with it. No explanations float to him from the corners of Harry’s room, no understanding dawns upon him for the coffee cup still clenched in his right hand.   
  
He looks around, noticing the layer of dust on the surface of the bookshelf, the untouched quality of the air around the cabinets. It’s as though Harry doesn’t live here, only pays occasional visits.   
  
As though the undone corners of the bed are the workings of a ghost inhabiting Harry’s skin.   
  
“I can’t sleep in a bed that isn’t this one,” Harry had admitted to Draco many long nights ago. “I miss you too much.”   
  
Draco had kept the master bedroom, Harry had moved out of it once sleeping in the same bed back to back had become awkward. For seven years, Draco has never stepped foot inside what used to once be a guest bedroom. For seven years, Harry’s tossing and turning in a bed too large and empty for him alone has gone unnoticed.   
  
He traces a finger over the edge of the headboard, and it comes away black with dust.   
  
“What happened?” He whispers into the stillness of the room. “Where did we go, my love?”   
  
His eyes fall to the bedside table where an envelope rests, thick and heavy. Harry’s familiar chicken scrawl has etched a few words across the front of it. Draco stoops to take a closer look and his heart stops in his throat.   
  
“To Draco: If you find me gone.”   
  
With shaking fingers, he lifts it, expecting divorce papers, or a deed to another house (unnecessary given that Draco has another house for himself which he’s waiting– stalling– to move into).   
  
What drops into his hand is a letter.   
  
He skims it, eyes widening with every word, and when he finally reaches the end, where Harry has signed off, his eyes desperately search for the words that would make all the difference in the world.   
  
“I wish you all the happiness,” Harry has written. “I pray you can move on.”   
  
Then his name, and nothing else.   
  
A shimmer atop the name catches his eye and with choked breaths Draco traces it, pushing his wandless magic into his finger, dispelling the glamour.   
  
“All of my love,” Harry has written in a shaky, unsure hand. The ink has spread slightly, as though blurred by fallen tears. Draco can’t hold in the gasp.   
  
His magic crackles around him, an uncontrollable burst of energy fuelled by grief.   
  
Clutching Harry’s letter in his hand, he wills his crumbling mind to Apparate him to where he knows Harry will be, hoping to hell that the goodbye note wasn’t a suicide letter.   
  
–   
  
The Wizarding Garden sequestered away behind the old Black property in Sheffield appears to be a crumbling ruin to the Muggles who pass it by everyday.   
  
Scorpius knows this is where Harry and Draco had gotten married, kissing each other in a public claim in full view of anybody and everybody who had ever mattered to them.   
  
When Draco blasts through the wards, Scorpius has a front row seat to the maniacal panic in his eyes, his survey of the surroundings, the warm crackle of his magic.   
  
“Harry?” He screams, and the worry and heartbreak bleeding into his voice is so familiar and foreign simultaneously that Scorpius begs Death to stop letting him see this. Death does not respond.   
  
“Please,” Scorpius begs the hooded figure standing before him. _“Please.”_   
  
–   
  
Draco finds Harry under the roses.   
  
His body is cold by the time Draco draws his head into his lap, screaming his name, pushing his magic into Harry’s core, begging him to be revived.   
  
“My love,” he begs eventually, voice hoarse and broken. “Oh my darling. Come back. _Come back._ ”   
  
But the poison Harry has worked into his system has done its job, and there is no part of Harry left to listen to him.   
  
Draco wonders distantly if Harry would follow through even if he could listen.   
  
After all, it had been Draco’s actions which pushed him to this dangling edge and finally threw him over.   
  
He lets his head drop onto Harry’s cold chest and wonders for how long it had been empty.   
  
– 

Harry opens his eyes to bright light and a sense of unfamiliar emptiness, instinctively aware that he isn’t alive.  
  
He looks around, aware that he’s still in the rose garden, standing in the middle of it, where he’d been when he’d drunk the poison before crawling over to the rose bushes that had petalled their wedding in their blooms.  
  
The sound of heavy breathing reaches his ears so he turns, surprised, and what he sees makes pain bloom down his chest.   
  
Draco’s sitting by Harry’s prone body, his head resting on the shell of who Harry used to be.   
  
Something he had forgotten to feel when he had decided to kill himself jerks in his chest.   
  
“When they find the leather pouch on you, they’ll find the nullified wand,” says a voice behind him, and Harry whirls around as the familiarity of the voice permeates his consciousness.   
  
“Scor?” He whispers, taking in the gangly frame of his son– his son who _died–_ his baby– his whole _life–_   
  
Scorpius smiles, a rueful glimmer of upturned lips and bashfulness. “The very same,” he says with a shrug.   
  
“What are you– are you a ghost?” Harry asks, shocked. He wouldn’t wish such a fate on anyone. Least of all his vivid, vibrant, beautiful son.   
  
“No,” Scorpius says. “Nor are you.”   
  
“So where–” Harry begins, cutting himself off, when he doesn’t understand how to phrase his question better.   
  
“We’re in the middle. I haven’t been able to pass on because I had to wait for…” he hesitates, before saying, “for either one of you to die. Our bond was too strong to be severed in death.”   
  
“Of course it was,” Harry murmurs. “You with your talk of us visiting help centres for sexually frustrated men, of course our bond was much too strong for issues as trivial as death.”   
  
Scorpius smiles, but Harry’s certain if he could cry, he would be by now.   
  
“I’ve missed you,” Scorpius says in a rush. “I had to watch Father and you all this while, since I–”  
  
“Shh,” Harry says, ignoring the heartache lancing through him. “Shh, my love. I’m here now.”  
  
“You’re dead!” Scorpius wails. “You _killed yourself._ ”  
  
Harry doesn’t know what to say to that.   
  
“What now?” He asks, instead.   
  
Scorpius draws himself together and looks around, searching, as though trying to find someone. Harry watches him, confused.   
  
“Figures they’d disappear now,” he murmurs, and Harry wants to demand he make sense of those words, but Scorpius turns back to him with a look in his eyes so weary and exhausted that instead of sixteen, he looks centuries old.   
  
He turns towards where Draco is still lying gasping on Harry’s body, fingers digging into a pulse point that stopped pulsing a long while ago and says, “We’re family. We wait.”   
  
  



End file.
